Hosting the Olympic Games: the Real Costs for Cities

"Yes, and it’s maybe a bit of a dry read, but Short presents a lot of detail that others hadn’t done before, for example, documenting all of the costs in tables. I think he provides the most realistic and valuable analysis of the basic facts and figures about the Olympics in this book: how much things cost, who pays for them and whether there are cost overruns. The Olympic industry has a habit—and the Olympic organizing committees and IOC and so on have a habit—of presenting figures in a way that suggests that certain Olympics broke even, if not made a profit. Because the costs of new facilities are amortized over the life of the assets, which is presumed to be 30 years or something like that, there are all these accounting tricks that disguise the fact that the city has to build a certain set of buildings and facilities and tracks and fields and pools and so on. Some of them are very useful as a legacy for the local community after the Olympics are over, and some of them are absolutely useless or almost useless. So, for instance, if you build a velodrome, an inside cycling track, it’s a very expensive facility to build and to maintain, and the actual track can only be used by elite athletes who are training for indoor cycling events. In the same vein, sliding centres for Winter Olympics, where they have luge, toboggan and skeleton—these kinds of events—these are not snowy places on a little hill in the park where you can take your kids. They are potentially life-threatening walls of ice that the luger navigates down at amazing speeds. In the case of Vancouver, during a training run, a luge athlete from Georgia was killed, and the subsequent enquiries showed that, while there wasn’t negligence, officials had warned that the barricades and the safety railings and all the rest of it were totally inadequate. Some people had said ‘someone will get killed’ and, tragically, someone did get killed. So, these facilities are extremely expensive to build and to operate, and they’re not a useful legacy for the city or the surrounding area. The money side of it is disguised with the language around “legacy”, which is all very warm and fuzzy. But the legacy has mixed benefits and is extremely expensive. There are the accounting tricks of amortizing the costs. Then there’s the cost of building the infrastructure, like new highways or a new airport. They’re certainly a benefit to the community later on, but it’s a sad commentary on local politicians that they won’t build adequate public transport and adequate facilities for local populations without this impetus, this catalyst of hosting the Olympics. Fewer do, but there’s a very noticeable trend that the ones that are bidding—and the 2022 Winter Olympics is a good example of this—tend to be dictatorships. And a lot of commentators, including me, have pointed out that the IOC has much less of a problem with awarding to dictatorships because they don’t have to worry about referendums. They’re not going to happen. They know that the facilities will be built on time and probably on budget, but if not on budget they’re not accountable to anyone as a dictatorship. At the same time worker safety on construction sites doesn’t matter so much. Qatar’s an infamous example, where the number of worker deaths every year is enormous, preparing the stadiums for the FIFA 2022 World Cup. Now the 2022 Winter Olympics have been awarded to Beijing. The IOC was stuck with two options, Kazakhstan or Beijing, and they thought that Beijing was a better bet. So that’s how that turned out. I think every city around the world is aware of the escalating costs of the Summer Olympics, because they’re enormous. There were eleven thousand athletes destined for Tokyo this year, although that’s not going to happen now. The security is enormous and the costs keep going up in other respects as well. Even climate change is having an impact as more extremes of heat affect the Summer Olympics. Well, like any social activity, they can’t be divorced from politics. Sport is political by definition, despite how much the IOC or anyone else argues that we should keep politics out of sport. I think my short answer is no, they can’t be reformed. Apart from the hype around the Olympics and the pageantry of the opening and closing ceremony, people are interested in track and field, swimming, gymnastics, figure skating—a handful of sports that spectators around the world love watching. The media rights holders know that there’s not much point televising archery. There are a lot of duds as far as the media is concerned. Most viewers around the world just want these high-profile sports with exciting outcomes, and those championships could be held as they are currently, and widely televised every two years or four years. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There are other options that don’t have the baggage of the Olympics and are not as enormous, like the Pan Am games, the Commonwealth Games and the Gay Games. Even IOC members are saying the games are getting too big. They try to cut back once in a while but, on the other hand, they add a lot because of diminishing interest. Thomas Bach, the IOC president, is particularly interested in attracting more youth and so it was his brainchild to start the Youth Olympics a few years back and to have sports like skateboarding and other urban sports. Surfing is coming up in the 2024 Olympics. So, to attract more youth as participants and as viewers because that’s the audience of the future, and all their market research on these topics has concluded that they’re not attracting enough youth."